


The Girl in the Mirror

by SomeEnchantedEve



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Infidelity, Miscarriage, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 10:03:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeEnchantedEve/pseuds/SomeEnchantedEve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the <a href="http://heroinebigbang.livejournal.com">Heroine Big Bang</a> on Livejournal. A look at the rarely-explored time between Lysa's wedding to Jon Arryn and the start of A Game of Thrones, and how she went from the happy, pretty girl in Riverrun to the woman we meet in the series. </p><p>'<i>Perhaps I </i>am<i> mad,</i> she ponders, as she falls wearily back onto the bed. <i>Do the mad know that they are mad?</i>'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1: The Eyrie

**Author's Note:**

> Whew! I've written fic of this length before, but this one was a challenge. I'm not sure if it's because I tend to write more of the 'wildly AU' type of fic now or because I knew from the start that the audience for this fic would likely be pretty small (the 'Crying About Lysa Tully' club!). Either way, I'm glad it is done and fairly pleased with the result, and I hope you enjoy it, too! If you do, I would love kudos/comments - a lot of work went into this! 
> 
> Special thanks to said 'Crying About Lysa Tully' club on Tumblr, who encouraged me when I was particularly frustrated with this piece. And a GIGANTICALLY HUGE thank you to my beta-reader, Alex (aka fields195). This was by far the biggest project I ever asked her to do, and she did her usual completely fabulous job. Thank you for helping this fic be the best it could be! I'm sorry that I still don't understand commas. XD
> 
> As this was part of a Big Bang, I have a mixer and an artist who signed on to create companion pieces. When I have links for those, I will edit to add them in! 
> 
> Without further ado, please enjoy!

She will tell herself differently years later, but when they stand together before the looking glass on the day of their weddings, Lysa thinks to herself how much finer and lovelier Catelyn looks than Lysa herself. 

It is their maiden cloaks, she tells herself, and she picks at hers despondently. Catelyn’s betrothal to Brandon Stark had been made years ago, and Catelyn had stitched her maiden cloak long ago with her tiny, perfect embroidery. Lysa’s match had been hastily made, and her cloak equally so; the design is haphazard, and the seams are crooked. But it is complete and that had been all that her maids had concerned themselves with, given how little time they had had to make the garment at all. 

She should not have expected anything else; since the day of her birth, Lysa has been the least of her siblings, the forgotten or hastily considered. Her elder brothers had been born weak and grey, dying before they had scarcely begun to live. When Catelyn came into the world red-faced and wailing, the fact that she had been a girl and not a boy had hardly mattered; she had been a healthy, strong child and that had pleased her parents enough. Years later, Edmure had been the long awaited boy child, the heir all of Riverrun had hoped for and had nearly given up on having. 

And in the middle had been Lysa’s birth - not the first healthy child, to be cherished regardless of gender, and not the heir born at last. Oh, she has been loved, certainly – but she is, in the end, of little consequence. 

“Come now,” Cat says, meeting her eye in the mirror, and she offers Lysa a wan smile. It does not light up her face, the way her smiles used to when they would run in the godswood of RIverrun, when they would trick Petyr into eating mudpies or convince him that a ferocious sea dragon lived in the waters of the Tumblestone. She dons the serious, composed expression of the lady of Riverrun, and Lysa wonders briefly if Cat wants this second-hand marriage any more than Lysa herself does. In the end, was Cat given any choice, or did her protests had fallen upon the deaf ears of their father as Lysa’s had? “Time to do our duty.” 

But somehow, Lysa suspects that no matter what Cat felt in her heart of hearts, she would have voiced no complaint to their father, would not have begged for a reprieve as Lysa shamelessly had. _Family, Duty, Honor_ , Cat would say, and she has always embodied their words far better than Lysa ever has, try as she might. 

Lysa does try, she _does_ , but she always seems to disappoint. 

But she does not weep as she weds Lord Jon Arryn before the sight of the Seven, and she thinks that should please her father enough. She takes Lord Arryn’s hands, his grip firm but the skin thin and loose, and she says the words as the septon bids her, her voice trembling no more than Cat’s. She does not cry at the dinner feast, either, when they seat her and Cat side by side, twin Tully brides now draped in marriage cloaks. Only her grip on Cat’s hand beneath the table, tight enough to leave nail marks on her sister’s palm, hints at her inner dread when they call for the bedding. 

Yet when she lies beside her new husband that night, an awful, wicked prayer dances through her head. _Perhaps he will die in the war,_ she thinks – she cannot help but hope - _and I will be free._ It is a terrible thing to wish upon him – Jon had been kind and gentle in their bedding, as cautious as if she were a maiden still (she wonders, though, if that had been for her benefit or for his own – a man’s hopeful imaginings). But his kiss had tasted sour in her mouth, his hands clammy on her body, and as she looks over at his weathered face and imagines years of bedding him, her own horror threatens to choke her. 

Desperately, she throws back the sheets and runs for the windows, throwing them open so she can breathe the sweet, crisp air of the Riverlands. She had not wept at her wedding, but now she lets the tears fall down silently, her head bowed over the sill, her gaze turned determinedly away from her husband, from the fate to which she has been cast. 

As always, Petyr is never far from her thoughts. She likes to think of him as he was before the stupid duel with Brandon Stark, before her father sent him away and gave her tea to drink and broke Lysa’s entire world. _Petyr’s_ kisses had always been sweet, his skin warm and smooth beneath her fingertips, and she cannot help but sob at the memory. _Shall I never know a young kiss again, or an embrace from strong arms?_ she wonders miserably. 

_No,_ she comforts herself, _there is every chance he may die at war yet. And if he does not, he is so old, how long could he possibly live? He will die, and I will be free. I will be free and the Lady of the Eyrie, and I can make my own match.”_

The thought soothes and lulls her into a sense of comfort. She falls asleep by the window, and in the morn, Lord Arryn does not comment on it. 

\--

When she misses her moonblood soon after the wedding, Lysa thinks that perhaps the humiliation of being wedded and bedded to a man thrice her age may have been worth it. Her father’s words whisper in her mind, his fervent promise - _be a good wife, and you will have sons, trueborn._ She goes to the sept, lights seven candles for the seven gods, and kneels before the statue of the Mother. The stone is old, the features weathered, and Lysa imagines she sees her own mother’s face reflected there. 

_Please,_ she prays, _let me have a son, a healthy boy, and I shall be a good wife._ She may never love her husband, may never desire him, but she could be a good wife – honorable and honest, loyal and true. Perhaps she would learn to be fond of him if he gave her children, and with so little remaining to her, Lysa thinks perhaps this could be enough. 

She tells no one except Cat – she wants to be sure before going to the maester and writing to her husband, but she can count on one hand the secrets she has kept from her sister in her lifetime, each more painful and costly than the last. She curls up in Cat’s bed as though they were young girls still, instead of wedded wives, and whispers the secret in her ear, her lips curling into a smile around the words. 

To her delighted surprise, Catelyn whispers back that she, too, has missed her bleeding. It is the start of the first happy fortnight Lysa has had since bleeding away her first babe, the one she is forbidden to speak of and advised to forget about, as though she ever could. 

“Our sons shall be the best of friends – they shall be closer than cousins, they shall be as close as brothers,” she declares, clasping her sister’s hand between her own. The leagues that sit between Winterfell and the Eyrie trouble Lysa little – perhaps Lord Arryn will be so pleased at her fertility, he will let her visit Cat regularly. Perhaps Cat and her son could come to Lysa in the Eyrie, and wait out the harsh northern winter there, as long as it may be. 

Catelyn’s smile is rueful, her eyes doubtful, and in her mind, Lysa curses her sister’s pessimism – which she so often claims is practicality. But her fingers curl around Lysa’s, squeezing tight. “I should like that,” she says. Each day from then on, Lysa goes to the sept to pray for a healthy boy and for a chance to raise him alongside her sister’s boy. 

It is in the sept that she starts to bleed, a fortnight later. 

It is not like the last time, not like after the tea. It comes as innocuously as her blood does every month, accompanied by nothing more than mild cramping in her belly. But she cannot help but see another life, another lost babe, staining her trembling fingers red, and their septa finds her there, on the floor in a heap, clutching her flat belly as though that would save her babe. 

The septa calls her ‘delicate’ to her face and whispers ‘hysterical’ to the maester behind her back. 

It is Cat who sits with her when she cries into her pillow, Cat who strokes the hair off her face, but even her sister doesn’t understand, and Lysa can feel her patience growing shorter as the days drag by. “It is just your moonblood,” Cat tells her soothingly, but Lysa can hear the note of exasperation beneath the words. “It came a little late, that is all. You will have plenty of time for children when the war is over, sweetling. You may have a dozen babes yet.” 

But to Lysa, the bleeding is a dark omen, a reminder that she had been wrong to hope, to dream that this reluctant marriage of swords could lead to any sort of joy. _Father was wrong,_ she thinks, and the tears start anew, trickling silently down her cheeks. _I shall never have a baby, they are all lost to me, just like Petyr’s son._

How could her sister possibly understand that she does not mourn just for the babe that never was – but for the one lost to her already, and the ones that she will never have? 

Cat is not merely _late_ ; her belly swells fat and round, and nine moons later, the heir of Winterfell is born, red and squalling, a strong, healthy son. There is no trace of Eddard Stark’s solemn, long features on his sweet little face, and it is so easy to watch him sleeping in his cradle and pretend that he is her own boy, the one stolen from her by tansy and pennyroyal. She watches his tiny rosebud mouth breathe in and out, his chest rise and fall. She imagines to herself that if he were to open his eyes, they would not be Tully blue but Petyr’s own grey-green, the eyes that always seemed to see right through to her soul. 

Sometimes, she will stand by the window, looking out over the rivers, envisioning a barge bearing her love back to her. How pleased he would be to see their boy – and certainly, that would make him love her. Lysa is sure that if only she had been able to have his son, Petyr would have loved her. 

“Do you want to hold him?” Catelyn asks, beaming, and the spell is broken. The shadow of war may hang over them, but Catelyn is all joy, all love, now that she is a mother. She scoops the little boy from the cradle, putting him in the crook of Lysa’s arm. 

He stirs slightly, nuzzling against her chest, his face scrunching when he finds nothing to suckle. His eyes open, and they are of course vivid blue, nothing like Petyr’s. The baby looks at her as though she is a stranger – and she is, she is not his mother. It is nothing more than an elaborate fantasy. His little face crumples as he opens his mouth to wail, and when Lysa shoves him back into Catelyn’s arms, Lysa realizes that she is crying herself. 

The babe quiets in the familiar warmth of Catelyn’s arms, and the room is full of only Lysa’s whimpers, like those of a wounded animal. Catelyn furrows her brow and reaches a hand out, but Lysa turns in a whirl and flees the room, away from her sister and her child, away from the ghosts that haunt her relentlessly. 

Catelyn, she knows, would never understand. 

\--

The war ends, and the time comes for Lysa and Catelyn to depart, for the east and the north, respectively. The retinue from the north arrives first, the Stark banners flapping in the wind, and Lysa watches from the window as her sister mounts her mare, her babe wrapped tightly against her breast, while Tully guards flank her on either side. Their uncle presses a kiss to her knuckles before handing her the reins, and Edmure hangs stubbornly back near the gate. Even from her rooms, Lysa can practically hear him sulking, and she wonders if he will feel such sorrow when she departs in a few days’ time. Cat has always been special to Edmure, the only mother he has ever known, and no matter how many times she would rebuke him for getting into mischief, that bond had never changed. 

Lysa had not wanted to see Cat and her baby off to a future brighter than that which awaited Lysa. So when the household had gone to bid Cat farewell, she had kept to her rooms, feigning illness, claiming her heart was too full for goodbyes. As her sister glances up at the castle, almost as though she could see Lysa despite the distance, Lysa presses her hand to the pane of glass and thinks perhaps she had not been entirely lying. 

Unlike Lord Eddard, Lysa’s husband comes to Riverrun personally to fetch her, and Lysa thinks that were her husband any other, she might feel a sort of smug satisfaction. Instead, she cannot help but recoil at the sight of him, at how much more war has aged him. How could such a man fight and live, she wonders, while the babes inside her die so easily? “My lord, I am glad to see you whole and well,” she greets, but the words sound hollow and empty. Lord Jon’s lips are dry and weathered as they press briefly, distractedly to her knuckles. 

To her surprise, her uncle is mounted beside Lord Jon. “I shall be serving you in your new household,” he tells her, a glint in his eye, and Lysa cannot help but weep in relief. Part of her longs to leave Riverrun behind forever, along with the misery it – and her _father_ \- has brought upon her. But the greater part of her is afraid to leave the only place she has ever called home for a stranger’s castle with an old man that she does not know or like. She wonders why her uncle would come to the Eyrie, rather than follow Catelyn to the North – Cat, who has always been the best loved by him, by _everyone_. But she does not ask, biting her tongue, as though reminding the Blackfish of Catelyn would cause him to change his course. Nor does she ask how her father took such news – her father gave her feelings such little care that Lysa cannot find it in her heart to worry about his own. 

“I am glad of it,” she answers honestly, blinking up at him, her eyes glassy and tears leaving tracks down her cheeks. 

“There now,” he says, with his usual gruff tenderness. “No tears, child.” Beside him, her husband looks uncomfortable at her display, and the guards of the Eyrie look at her askance, as though disbelieving that such a girl, full of weak sentimentality, shall be their lady. Like a child, she swipes at the apples of her cheeks with the palms of her hands, attempting to school her face into an expression of ladylike dignity as Ser Robin helps her mount into the saddle. 

Lord Jon tries to fill the heavy silence that settles between them, but Lysa cannot help but feel as though he is tutoring her, lecturing a child ward on the history of the Vale. She lets the words wash over her like water, giving an occasional non-committal hum, the way she would in her lessons with Maester Vyman. The only thing she takes note of is the mention of the Fingers, and she cannot help but feel her heart rise at the thought of being closer to her Petyr, if only marginally so. _Perhaps he could also serve at the Eyrie, as Uncle Brynden is to do,_ she wonders, and she resolves that once she is situated in her new home, she will make it a priority to find a position worthy of Petyr’s intelligence and talents. 

The pace is slow and difficult, the hooves of their mounts kicking up the snow still covering the High Road. The mountains loom on either side of them like silent ghosts, and every sound echoes unnaturally in the valley, causing Lysa to shiver. The foreboding atmosphere does not bother Lord Jon at all. “It will be quite beautiful in the summer,” he tells her. “You will see.” 

The Bloody Gate, she is told, is normally manned from two watchtowers over a pass so narrow that riders must fall into single file to travel through. “Your uncle shall serve as Knight of the Gate,” Lord Jon explains, eyeing the empty bridge looming before them, stretching between the two mountains that tower above. “A thousand men have smashed themselves against the Gate to no avail. And the Eyrie itself is impregnable. You will be quite safe there, my lady.” 

“I alone?” she asks, hearing what he leaves unsaid, furrowing her brow in confusion. 

“His Grace King Robert has asked me to serve as the Hand of the King,” he replies, and silently, Lysa repeats _His Grace King Robert,_ to herself, trying to acclimate herself to the words lest she make an embarrassing blunder. “And so I shall return to King’s Landing after the moon’s turn, for the coronation and then to serve him.” 

“And I shall remain behind,” she deduces, uncertain if the idea fills her with relief or dread. She may have no love for this man, may long for any reason to avoid his company and especially his bed, but he is at least slightly more familiar to her than any of the other knights of the Eyrie. As they approach the base of Giant’s Lance, she gazes skyward, and even with her head craned she cannot see the castle at the peak. It is the most isolated place Lysa can imagine, and there she shall stay, alone. Even her uncle will be much occupied with his new position. It is only the thought of Catelyn in the North without even the slight comfort of the Blackfish nearby that keeps Lysa’s jaw from trembling with sorrow. 

“Yes,” Lord Jon replies, and there is no room for argument, no room for pity. “You are Lady of the Eyrie.” As she glances over at him, the slightest hint of a smile passes his lips. “Welcome home.” 

\--

Her husband invites her to accompany him for the royal wedding and coronation, and Lysa is glad of it; the Eyrie is smaller than Riverrun, but even after a moon’s turn she cannot seem to find her way. The narrow towers all look the same; it makes her dizzy trying to recall which room is where, peering out the high windows to see six similar towers, and looking down to find nothing but sky below her. Lord Jon spends his days locked in his solar with the household, making plans and provisions for his absence – meetings that she is not asked to attend, though she is to act as lady of the castle. 

Lord Jon had shown her the castle her first day, but since then, he has left her largely to her own devices. She sees him only at meals and when he visits her bed, which he does regularly, to her displeasure. When she lies beneath him, she closes her eyes and remembers the nights she spent with Petyr under cloak of darkness. The business of the marriage bed is so far from the secret passion she shared with the boy she loved that even the memory of Petyr does not bring her pleasure as Lord Jon labors over her. _Family, duty, honor,_ she thinks instead, and the words echo in her head with her father’s voice. Lord Jon needed an heir; it is the entire reason he had taken her to wed. _Be a good wife and you will have sons, trueborn._

He does not stay the night, and that is a small consolation. By the time they reach the capital, she has missed her moon blood again. Sometimes she catches herself holding her breath in anticipation, and she prays silently that she is not simply mistaken again, that she has taken with child in truth. 

King Robert embraces Lord Jon eagerly, as though they had been apart for years, and laments the fact that Ned Stark would not make the trek from Winterfell for the occasion. Lysa’s heart sinks – she had hoped for her sister’s company and had even been finally ready to spend time with her nephew, now that her own womb seemed to be doing its duty. But the journey from Winterfell is long and treacherous even in the summer years, and one of Lord Eddard’s infrequent letters to Catelyn in Riverrun had mentioned a disagreement between himself and the king. Lysa wonders which reason is responsible for their absence. 

It is a thrill to be in King’s Landing - their father took Cat to court once, but Lysa had been too young, and so it is her first time in the capital. Lurking in the corners of the streets, she can see the remnants of war, but in the castle, no expense is spared to make the wedding and coronation large and lavish, all the better to solidify the new power on the throne. 

It is not until the wedding that Lysa sees Cersei Lannister, the girl who is to be queen. She has never met Lady Cersei before, though she well remembers her twin brother, and how sorely disappointed she had been when her father’s work at a betrothal had come to naught. Lady Cersei is every inch as beautiful and gloriously breathtaking as her brother, dressed in a white gown with her red maiden cloak setting off the gold of her hair, the same shade as the ferocious lion stitched at her back. She seems to float, rather than walk, to the front of the Sept of Baelor to meet King Robert, looking tall, strong, and handsome in a black doublet trimmed with gold. They are such a vision together, light and dark, dainty and powerful, that Lysa loses her breath at the sight of it. 

“Beautiful,” she breathes, her heart in her throat, and beside her, Lord Jon chuckles dryly, the sound bringing her crashing back down to earth. _I shall never have such an ending,_ she thinks mournfully, as she watches the golden couple make their vows, pledge their love. Tywin Lannister sweeps the Lannister cloak from his daughter’s shoulders, and the king makes Cersei Lannister a Baratheon queen. 

Lady Cersei – _Queen_ Cersei – is the sort of lady of which songs are written; Cat is that sort, too, the kind of woman that men will draw blades over. Beside the brilliance of the lioness of Lannister, Lysa feels dull and plain. _I shall never be that lovely, nor that happy. Their song is just beginning, and mine is over forever._ Suddenly, she feels old and weary, as ancient as her lord husband, with the best of her years behind her and nothing but loneliness and emptiness before her. 

Discreetly, she touches her belly and says a silent prayer. _Please, please, let me carry a boy,_ she asks, gazing up at the majestic statues of the Seven as the king and his bride make their way to the front, to be crowned in the sight of the gods. _Let me have a son,_ she thinks, watching as the High Septon places the crown upon the queen’s golden curls, _that is all the song I need. I do not need a crown, or glory, or even a handsome husband. I need a child._

When she returns to the Eyrie, the gods see fit to answer her prayers. It is her fault, she tells herself later, for not being more specific. It is her fault for not asking that he be born big and strong; it is because of her that the babe is born blue and dead. And though the maester keeps his face impassive, and her ladies coo in sympathy, their eyes all tell Lysa that they quite agree – the blame lies with her alone. 

\--

Lord Jon takes much of the household with him when he departs for King’s Landing, leaving Lysa with few hands and no idea as to how to rule a great estate. Her septa tried to teach her, but Lysa had never been diligent in her studies – she had loved to read stories of old, and enjoyed sewing, but numbers and household ledgers made her head ache. And it had been Catelyn who had put those skills into practice in Riverrun, Catelyn who their father had entrusted to manage the affairs of the castle after their mother’s death. 

The servants are deferential, the stewards are kind, and Lysa knows they show her such respect only for love of her husband. It is largely for show, she finds, as she stumbles over orders of supplies – she miscalculates and Maester Colemon discreetly corrects her errors. During the war, the Eyrie learned to manage without its lord, and it continues to function in his absence now. Here, as in everywhere, Lysa finds she is superfluous. 

In the absence of some other purpose, she throws herself into the task she had set – to find a position worthy of her Petyr, to somehow make amends for all that her father had taken from him – taken from them both. Her own struggles with understanding the finances of the Eyrie remind her of how clever Petyr had been with sums, and in one of her dutiful letters to her husband, she suggests that perhaps he would be someone well suited to manage customs in one of the Eyrie’s ports. _Gulltown, mayhaps,_ she writes. It is no small thing to ask – Gulltown serves as not only the port from King’s Landing and to the North, but as the main entry to the Vale for ships from Braavos with valuable cargo to trade. 

She writes to Petyr, as well, and pours her heart into those letters, in a way she had been too timid to do in person. She does not spare any detail of her unhappiness, of her sorrow for the way they parted, and writes how desperately she longs for the pleasure of his company again. His return letters are brief and rare, and they ask above all of Catelyn. _She will not write to me,_ he confesses, and Lysa’s stomach clenches at the thought of Petyr writing to Cat, spending time that he would not offer to her. _If I had given him a son, he would love me more than her,_ she cannot help but think, and she mourns that the opportunity is forever lost to her. It is not the gift of a child, but perhaps if she can secure him a position of affluence, he will come to appreciate and love her. 

Catelyn does not spare much thought for anything south of the Neck anymore, it seems. Lysa had thought to write her sister after her babe was born dead, but every time she had sat at her small writing desk to compose a letter, all she could think of was Cat’s healthy son, and the words would freeze on her quill. _She could never, ever understand,_ Lysa had thought to herself, and her eyes had burned with tears. 

But despite her repeated cajoling, Lord Jon does not reply to her request, sending instead only a brief note that he will visit the Eyrie within the next moon. At the thought, she feels a flutter of anticipation – she does not miss Lord Jon, and it is a relief to bed alone each night, but she also knows that his visits are her only opportunity to get with child again. The image of her little son born blue haunts her sleep, and she sees his pale, still face in her nightmares each night. He had been so tiny in her arms, his skin still warm from her womb, and in her dreams, he turns into a mockingbird and flies away from her, out the open window before she can catch him and hold him close. _I did not even name him. He should have had a name._

She plays the dutiful lady, the _good wife_ , receiving him to her bed each night and waiting for her promised reward. She tells herself it is all a game of playacting, like those from her youth, and thus she bears his distracted caresses with his weathered hands, the sour taste of his breath when he kisses her with chapped lips. 

This time, the blessings come hand in hand. She twice misses her bleeding, enough that she feels safe to tell Lord Jon the news before he returns to King’s Landing. He is pleased; she can tell by the glint in his eyes that he still harbors hope for an heir, and it remains the sole thing they have in common. His gladness emboldens her, and she asks outright, while he prepares his horse to depart, if there is not a place in Gulltown or another harbor for a minor lord with a head for numbers. 

Lord Jon frowns briefly, glancing at the guard waiting for him to begin their descent; they are impatient to leave and so is he. “The lad can serve as an apprentice to the master of coin, if it please you,” he finally replies, with a note of exasperation, and Lysa congratulates herself on catching him at the last moment, when he does not have time to think of a reason to deny her. 

“I am sure he will serve you well, my lord,” she says, unable to keep the smile from spreading across her face, and Lord Jon nods shortly. Fleetingly, she wonders if knows who the father of her child had been, or if Lord Jon can tell by her face alone. Cat has always said that she is a terrible liar, that one need only look at Lysa’s face to see the truth written there. But then, she admits to herself as Lord Jon dryly kisses her hand before departing, her husband so rarely looks at her, _really_ looks at her, that perhaps the secret remains safe. Perhaps he thinks of it as nothing more than a sibling’s fondness, rather than loyalty to the greatest love of her life. 

Once, such inattention might have vexed her, but here, Lysa takes it as the gift it is. 

She writes to Petyr that very evening to give him the news. _I always knew you were destined for great things, you are so clever,_ she writes. _And surely this will be only the beginning._

It is the beginning for Petyr, and she is glad of it. But even her happiness in her love, and her joy when he writes to thank her for her continued patronage, cannot temper her grief when she wakes in a bed of blood. 

When her maids take her ruined sheets away, she overhears them lamenting. How sad it is, they say, that poor, good Lord Arryn cannot get an heir. _And what of me?_ she wants to demand. _It is his fault to begin with, his seed is old and weak, I deserve more than this!_

Instead, she bites her lip until her mouth fills with blood ( _blood, blood, it always comes back to blood…_ ). And when she loses the next babe much the same way the next year, she does not call for her maids to help her. She pulls the sheets from the mattress herself, stoking the fire with clumsy fingers unused to such menial tasks. Numbly, methodically, she tears the sheets into strips and feeds them to the flames, watching as all that remains of yet another lost child burns. 

Her maids come in unannounced to tend to the fire themselves and find her there, with bloody fabric in her hands and a trail of red footprints from her bed to the hearth. They stare aghast at her, and call for the maester. Lysa spends the next three days in bed, her mind a haze from dreamwine. She does not mind it – in her dreams, she is surrounded by the babies she lost, all with green-grey eyes and Petyr’s teasing smile. They are always just out of her grasp, though, just a finger’s stretch away, and when she closes the distance to grab them and hold them near, they disappear into smoke and ash. _Be a good wife, and you will have sons, trueborn,_ her father’s voice echoes in her mind. 

_You lie, you lie,_ she cries back. It is not until later that she learns that she has spoken out loud, screamed the words into her bedchamber. They bring her uncle to comfort her, but his face distorts in her twilight sleep, and she pushes his hands away, so like her father’s. _Liar, liar, liar._

When the dreamwine’s effects wear away, and she awakens in truth, she learns the maester has written to her husband and told him that she is mad. Instinctively, she opens her mouth to deny it, but as she remembers her dreams, the words do not come. _Perhaps I have gone mad,_ she thinks numbly, and she closes her eyes and wishes to never again wake. 

Lord Jon’s response is to send for her to join him. _The Eyrie can be a lonely place,_ he writes. _You may find that light and warmth of the capital will better suit you._ She can read the care taken in choosing each word, and still see the true meaning within – he wishes to keep an eye on her, to make sure she does not embarrass him or cause some scandal with her supposed madness. 

But he is right that the Eyrie is a lonely, chilling place. She remembers the elegance and extravagance of King Robert’s court – the beautiful queen, the handsome knights, the gowns and colors and revelry – all of it like out of a song. _Perhaps he is right, perhaps it will suit me better,_ Lysa thinks, and she tells her uncle as much. 

He smiles his sad smile, touching her hair the way he did when she was a child, when she and Cat and Edmure, even Petyr, would run to him with their little troubles and tales. “Mayhaps, little one,” he says, but in a voice that betrays his doubt. At the endearment, she wants nothing more than to curl up in his lap the way that she would as a child and weep her sorrows. How awful her troubles had seemed those days, how keenly she had felt every little hurt. If only she had known of the heartbreak yet to come. 

She has to believe that something better awaits her in King’s Landing, some measure of happiness. Otherwise, she thinks she will go mad indeed.


	2. Part 2: King's Landing

Ravens from Catelyn are infrequent, but Lysa receives one soon after her arrival in King’s Landing. Her sister’s joy is unmistakable as she writes of the birth of her daughter, a strong girl she has named Sansa. Her sister has had two pregnancies to Lysa’s four. _I am twice as fertile as she is,_ Lysa thinks, as her tears fall on the parchment and smear her sister’s ink, _but I have nothing but blood to show for it._

She had not told Catelyn of the last two she had lost, the ones that bled onto her bedding. Few outside the Eyrie knew she had been with child since her boy was born dead. _It is as if it never happened,_ Lysa thinks, and she resolves to live her life as though it never _had_ happened. If so desperately wanting to forget, if so badly needing a new beginning made her mad, then Lysa would embrace madness. 

It is easier to distract herself in the capital than it had been in the Eyrie. She may be the Lady of the Vale, but here she is also the wife of the Hand of the King, and therefore second in standing only to the queen. Jon gives her enough golden dragons to have gowns made to befit her new station, and the task delights Lysa – in her youth, it had always been Catelyn with the finer clothes, the grander dresses, as the first daughter of Hoster Tully and then the acting Lady of Riverrun. She picks silky fabrics of light blue and silver, to honor her husband and bring out her eyes and the rich red of her hair. When she is measured, she cannot help but notice the slight thickening of her waist, the extra weight in her breasts and hips, and she frowns at her reflection in the great looking glass of her rooms. _Soon,_ she tells herself, _soon I will have a child, and it will not matter._

In King’s Landing, she has the company of other highborn ladies, and she imagines in time, perhaps they will be closer to her than even Cat. Each is more beautiful than the last, but as the stars cannot outshine the moon, they all pale in comparison to the queen. In Lysa’s time away from court, Queen Cersei has only become more beautiful, more otherworldly and untouchable; though she has a healthy, beautiful son – the heir to the throne – Lysa cannot imagine that the queen’s stomach and breasts are lined from stretching the way Lysa’s own are. _No,_ she decides, as she sews and watches the queen carefully beneath her lowered lashes, _no, she is perfect._

For a moon’s turn – perhaps even two – she is happy, happier than she has been since she bled in the RIverrun sept. She waits in breathless anticipation for her life to begin, for her _song_ to start. Her contentment seems to reassure Jon that she is not mad after all, and when he visits her less often, watches her less closely, she relishes that newfound freedom as well. 

On one of the rare meals that they take together, he admits that she had been right to recommend young Baelish, who had shown so much promise that Jon was entrusting him with the entirety of the Gulltown accounts. She cannot help but flush with happiness, and that night she sends a raven to Petyr to congratulate him, to assure him that she would continue to work for his advancement, to say that soon everyone would realize what she had known all along – that he is clever beyond measure and worth far more than his name would suggest. 

But though he largely leaves her on her own, Jon still visits her bed at night in hopes of making a child. Yet it is not the _making_ that troubles them, but the _keeping_. She misses her moonblood not long after her arrival, and two moons later, she bleeds out yet another babe – this time into the water of her bath, turning it a sickly, haunting shade of red. _Blood, blood, I am forever surrounded with blood,_ echoes in her mind, and she drowns out the words with a terrified scream that brings all her maids running. 

It is after the loss of that child that she writes to Cat, more plaintively than she has done in the past. Always, she has striven to be as dutiful, as strong and brave as her sister, but the latest tragedy weakens her resolve. _Please come to me,_ she writes, _for I am in need of your comfort._ And she is in need of her sister – the queen may be ethereally beautiful, but she regards all her ladies with cool disinterest, to which Lysa is no exception. The other ladies of the court see her as another rival to favor and position, and there are knives in their sweet smiles. She has seen her sister but once since they left Riverrun, and the place in Lysa’s heart that Catelyn occupies aches in her absence. There had been times near the end of their girlhood when she had envied her sister, nearly hated her for all she had and that Lysa was denied – Petyr’s first-most affections, a handsome and young betrothed in Brandon Stark, and finally a strong son with nearly no effort at all. Yet even in those darker moments, Catelyn’s presence had been a comfort for its familiarity alone. _Come to King’s Landing,_ Lysa writes, she _begs_ , and Catelyn replies that in the next moon’s turn, she will depart with the children to visit Lysa at court. 

Lysa has no desire to see her nephew or niece – strong, red-haired, trueborn children - proof again of Catelyn’s successes and Lysa’s struggles. But in the end, it does not matter – before Cat can leave Winterfell, word comes of trouble in the Iron Islands, and suddenly , there is to be another war so her sister cannot visit at all. 

It troubles Lysa this time, to send her husband off to war. She still feels no affection for him, but her moonblood has come regularly since losing the last babe, and she is keenly aware that he is leaving her behind without an heir to the Eyrie. She is older now, no longer the sixteen year old who had prayed for his death, thinking the marriage could be cast aside. _What will become of me if he dies?_ she wonders – _and he is so old, surely it is likely that he will die_. The Vale and Eyrie would pass to some distant Arryn relative, and Lysa would be returned to Riverrun, with no son and therefore no great claim of her own. _I would be no more free than I am today,_ she thinks miserably – her father would make her another awful match, like as not with yet another old man so desperate for an heir that he would take a girl who has only birthed blood and death. 

“I will pray for your safe return, my lord,” she tells Lord Jon before he departs. He looks surprised at her well wishes, but she means them – simply for her own sake, rather than his. 

\--

When she finally sees her sister, she has not two but three children in tow. 

King Robert had not forgotten that Lysa’s father had fought by his side in the Rebellion, and he deigns to honor his old ally by bringing the court to visit Riverrun. The thought of her girlhood home makes Lysa wistful and angry all at once – she had lived and loved and grown there, but she had lost so much there, as well, and she has little desire to see her father. 

But Catelyn writes that she will be in attendance with her babes, the youngest not even weaned yet. Her husband will remain in the remote north - _there must always be a Stark in Winterfell,_ Catelyn writes. Jon’s face is disappointed when Lysa shows him the letter, and she knows the king will be equally so – for all that she finds her good-brother grim and sour, it seems that there are a great number of people who love him fiercely. 

Catelyn is among those people, Lysa learns when she finally sees her in Riverrun. Her proper, practical sister would never say so, but she does not need to. It is laced through her words, lurking in the corner of her smile – an obvious affection. _What must it be like,_ Lysa cannot help but wonder, _to love honorably and openly?_ She would not know - not she, who lives on secret letters and smothered passion. And certainly, Lysa does not think Cat could imagine loving in Lysa’s manner – her dutiful sister had always only let her affections go where they were allowed, had always checked her emotions and heart to the beat of _family, duty, honor._

Her sister’s children are all strong and beautiful – the boy is big and boisterous, as hardy as Edmure had been as a child. Little Sansa is as delicate and beautiful as a doll, with the sweetest manners and eyes that gleamed with excitement at the pageantry of court. The babe is dark-haired where the others are light, and cries often; though Cat is obviously weary, she is also alightwith happiness over her little family. 

_They could all so easily be mine,_ Lysa thinks – in another world, in another life where she might have been happy. 

“I have splendid news,” she says, turning her mind towards the reasons she _does_ have for joy. She is unable to keep the secret smile from spreading across her lips at Catelyn’s expectant face, and she adds, “My lord husband is so pleased with Petyr’s progress in Gulltown, that he is recommending him to the king. He is to come to court to work on the accounting books. Think of that! He may be Master of Coin one day! I always knew he would rise high!” 

Catelyn blinks, and Lysa catches the surprise that she cannot quite hide in her eyes. Her brow furrows briefly, and goes smooth again. The eagerness on her face drains away, and Lysa watches as she schools her expression into one of perfect courtesy. “I am glad for him, then,” she answers, and there is a gentleness to her voice that Lysa does not understand until Cat’s hand lands gently upon her own. 

_She thought I was going to say I was with child,_ Lysa realizes, her face flushing at the misunderstanding. Cat squeezes her hand gently before reclaiming it, shifting the fussy babe in her arms. “Why do you not give her to the nursemaid?” she asks idly. 

Cat laughs at that. “If I gave her to the nursemaid every time she fussed, I would never hold my daughter at all. She has the wolf’s blood in her, this one.” There is such affection laced through Cat’s words, such easy happiness, and there is a touch of sympathy in her eyes as she meets Lysa’s gaze, a touch of _you could never understand._ It is so far from the truth that Lysa must curl her fists into her skirts to keep from slapping her sister – she has not yet birthed a live child, but she has been a mother to each one that has taken root inside her. 

But Lysa refuses to let her sister’s mistake zap the joy she feels at the notion that soon, she will again hold her love in her arms. Reluctantly, she recalls the last letter Petyr sent her, the request he made of her therein to intercede with Catelyn for him, and it is only her love for him that makes her broach the subject. “Petyr writes to me quite often,” she says, not without a touch of smugness, of territorialism. “Perhaps you could write to congratulate him on his new turn of fortune.” 

Cat looks surprised – not at the mere request but at the mention of Petyr once more. Her mind has already moved on – to the babe in her arms, to the two children running wild with Edmure in the godswood, to the husband far in the north – and Lysa has confused her by circling back. _I told you she never thinks of you,_ Lysa silently chides, as though Petyr could hear her, as though he could finally understand. “Some things are better left alone, I think,” Cat replies gently. 

Edmure crashes through the line of trees, with an excitable boy of six dancing about his legs and a squealing little lady of three perched upon his shoulders, her fists full of water lilies. “Mama!” she shrieks in glee, waving the blossoms in their direction, and Lysa watches as Catelyn’s face splits into a beatific smile. 

She rises to greet her children, to accept the blooms from her proud daughter’s fat little fists. Her son tugs her skirt, eagerly recounting his fierce battle with his uncle deep in the wood, and Edmure laughs as he ruffles the boy’s hair and swings the girl to the ground. Lysa remembers when Catelyn had first birthed her son, and Edmure had sulked fiercely about the castle, resentful of sharing the attention of his surrogate mother. But now that he is a bit older, he seems amused by his little niece and nephew, as the diversions that they are. 

Lysa watches them from her seat on the ground with a curious sort of detachment, as though she is watching players act out a story. They are firmly ensconced in the present, and Lysa is living ten years in the past – the last time she was truly happy. 

\--

She has her maid bring word as soon as Petyr arrives. Though she longs to run to him, to greet him at the gate and rush into his arms, she forces herself to remain still and cool, working on her embroidery in her rooms. She had always known that Petyr would rise high with his ready mind, but Lysa is the wife of the Hand – she is higher still, and should act according to her station. 

And so she rises casually when he comes to pay his respects, neatly setting aside the tiny baby’s gown she has been working on. It is a garment for the queen’s coming babe, sewn of the softest white silk and inlaid with tiny pearls. Lysa’s embroidery has always been fine, and she swears to herself that her own child, when he finally comes, will have a blessing gown just as beautiful, just as rich, sewn with her own loving hands. But she will wait to make it – she is scarcely two moons into this pregnancy, and to create such a thing now seems to be tempting the gods. 

She has not even mentioned yet to Jon that she has missed her blood, as she balances again on the precipice between disaster and her greatest desire, but she suspects that her maid may have already told him after she missed for the second time. Jon walks around with the look of a man expecting good news, and the gods knew that the king and the council rarely provided such a thing to the Hand. She does not know whether to be angrier over the fact that he has her maid report to him, or the fact that he has the audacity to hope still. It is one thing they have in common – that damnable, clinging hope – and she despises it in both of them. 

Her belly is already starting to curve a bit, remembering all too easily the shape of pregnancy though she has nothing to show for her toils. The change is still small enough to disguise beneath her thick bodice, and of that she is glad. It is the first time she and Petyr will lay eyes upon each other in over eight years, and she does not relish the thought of him seeing her heavy with another man’s child upon their reunion. 

“My lady,” he greets, bowing low before her, and the sound of his voice, the reverence in the honorific, sends a thrill racing down her spine. He takes her hand, pressing a kiss to her knuckles, and his mustache prickles against her skin. She frowns slightly, misliking the feel of it ( _it is not as I remember…_ ), but she lingers all the same, her fingertips brushing against the inside of his palm. 

When he straightens, Lysa sees that the mustache and small pointed beard he now dons are not the only changes time has wrought upon Petyr’s features. There is a wariness and coolness to his green-grey eyes, a hint of slyness in the smile that still lingers in the corner of his lips. Once that smile had been open and honest, and gladdened her heart; instead now it is tinged with the bitterness of disappointment. Her heart aches for him at the very sight of it - _oh, my love,_ she wonders silently to herself, _have the years brought you sorrows as heavy as my own?_

For all that is changed, Lysa is surprised at how much is still the same. His palm is still smooth and soft when he grips her fingers – swordplay has never been his talent, and how differently his hands feel from Jon’s as a result. Petyr is no taller and no wider than he had been as a slim, small youth of five-and-ten, and Lysa shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot, suddenly feeling large and ungainly in comparison. _Oh, what is wrong with you?_ she scolds herself. _You have waited for years for this moment, do not ruin it now._

She holds his gaze for a beat, drinking in the sight of him before her after so long of nothing more than illusions and daydreams to sustain her. “I am so glad to see you come to court,” she finally says, suddenly keenly aware of her ladies’ eyes alighting upon her in curiosity. Her words are nothing more than courteous, but her tone is warm, and she applauds herself for achieving that happy medium. So often as a girl she would dissolve into childlike giggles, or be struck dumb by her nerves, but she a woman grown now, and an equal to any great lady – an equal to her sister, certainly, and perhaps even to the golden queen. 

He inclines his head slightly, wearing that familiar smile full of secrets. “A development that I owe entirely to you, my lady.” His fingers press ever so lightly against hers. “I am entirely in your debt. A debt I hope to repay.” He releases her hand, and immediately, Lysa mourns the loss of his touch. Her breath catches in her throat, and she quickly glances to the side, overwhelmed with emotion, hoping that her ladies do not see how deeply his mere presence affects her. 

There is a promise in his voice, in his words - _a debt I hope to repay_ \- and the thought that he may keep it is terrifying and exhilarating all at once. 

\--

Not long after Petyr’s arrival to court, Lysa loses the babe she carries. 

She bleeds out this child whilst waiting on the queen, sewing shirts for the poor. It is nothing more than a mummer’s farce, a suggestion by Lysa’s own lord husband to increase good will amongst the people of Flea Bottom, so that they are met with smiles rather than the hungry, bitter stares that so often greet the queen and her court when they ride through the city. King Robert is beloved, no matter how fat and drunk he may become, but the queen is not, despite the two beautiful children she has birthed. The common folk look upon her rich dresses and costly jewels, coupled with the haughty turn of her nose, and their envy turns to anger. _They want to love her. Showing piety and generosity will endear her to the people,_ Jon had explained to the king over dinner. How Lysa hates those private dinners, where she is practically invisible, as the king and her husband discuss the matters of the realm (or, more accurately, Jon discusses and the king drinks and pretends to listen) and the queen looks right through her with those lovely emerald eyes, as though she were nothing more than a pane of glass. 

Lysa very much doubts that the king cares if the people love his queen; rather, she suspects that he thrills in condemning her to menial work. The queen does not complain, but begins the task with that expression of glacial indifference, one that always hints that she is tallying the small humiliations, to strike back like a coiled toy. _Or like a viper, rather than a lion._

The queen pricks her long, elegant white finger, and her ladies descend like fluttering doves, cooing their sympathy, exclaiming their horror when a small droplet of blood stains Queen Cersei’s golden gown, and she scowls at the sight of it. Lysa rises, same as the rest, and suddenly every eye in the room is upon her, the overwrought expressions of dismay melting into true horror. “Lady Arryn,” one of them gasps, pointing at her gown, and Lysa cranes her neck to try and see. 

She touches the back of her gown, and her hand comes away wet and red. It drips from her fingers and falls upon the stones of the floor, as tiny and insignificant as the blood drawn from the prick of Queen Cersei’s finger. _How can something so little ruin everything?_

She faints away, and her last conscious thought is that if the gods were merciful, she would never awaken. 

(The gods show her no mercy – they never have and never will.) 

For a fortnight, she does not rise - _cannot_ rise. She lies upon her feather mattress with a hand on her belly, still rounded, though she no longer carries life within her. It is as if the last vestiges of hope have bled away along with the last babe, leaving her hollow and empty. Only when she touches her face and finds it damp and puffy does she realize that she has been weeping. Jon visits her but once, his brow furrowing as he tries to reconcile what has happened with what he knew before. The pregnancy had been so new, so fraught, that she had decided not to tell anyone of it until nearer to the babe’s birth, not even Jon himself. It is a situation of her own making, but she cannot help but be resentful that he does not have to share her unbearable loss, her weighty sorrow, and she turns her face away from him, refusing to speak when he asks after her health. 

“I will see you when you are better,” he finally says after a lengthy silence, his voice tight with irritation. _I will never be better. I will never move past this,_ Lysa thinks, her eyes welling once more even as the door shuts behind her husband. It matters naught to her – it would not matter if she never saw him again, disgusting old man that he is, incapable of giving her anything but death and loss. Silently, she adds another lyric to the song running through her head, this one an oath. _I will never forgive him for this._

Time slips so easily away while she remains abed. Jon leaves her to her sorrow, her maids go about their duties silently, and Lysa wraps her grief around herself like a comforting blanket, curls in on herself like a dying leaf. Even the thought of Petyr cannot stir her from her agony – he sends her a note, offering her his condolences with sweet, sympathetic words, but he does not come to her in those nights. These are a woman’s sorrows, and she is expected to bear them alone. 

But if her heart longs for relief, her body refuses to cooperate and die, so eventually, she must admit that life goes on. She rises from her bed and rejoins the court with the air of a woman a thousand years old, slow and aching with each step. When she looks into the mirror, there she sees reflected an aging, hard woman, puffy of body and face, with lines around her mouth from an ever-present pinched frown and across her forehead from wrinkling her brow in concern. She cannot even weep as she confronts the evidence – her youth, her beauty, her vitality, all lost and with nothing to show for her troubles. 

As though she could mask the transformation that so much sadness has wrought upon her body, she buys ever more expensive silks and brocades, having them fashioned into new garments. She takes a vindictive delight in emptying Jon’s coffers to drape herself in elegant fashion, and when the ladies of the court stare at her and whisper, Lysa tells herself that they are merely admiring her gowns. 

It is after she reemerges to court life that Petyr calls upon her – this time late at night, after her maids have left her. Lysa sits before her looking glass, running a brush through her auburn locks – one of the ladies had taken down her hair only an hour ago, yet Lysa finds the strokes soothing so she often repeats the task. 

“My lady,” he murmurs when he takes her hand and kisses her knuckles over the great sapphire ring that she likes to think matches her eyes. “I am so sorry to hear of your sorrows.” 

Her eyes fill with tears at once, and on the heels of her sadness comes a rush of irritation at herself. She had been doing so well, moving about the castle with an air of cool haughtiness that rivaled even that of the queen. She had played her part so skillfull that for a moment, she had even tricked herself into believing that perhaps the tragedies life had brought her have not ruined her irrevocably. _A fool,_ she thinks, as the tears splash down her cheeks and over their clasped fingers. _I am, as ever, a fool._

“I have nothing,” she whispers, and the admission sticks in her throat. “Nothing, Petyr.” 

“Now that is untrue,” he tells her, his voice nearly unbearable in its gentleness. “We have each other, do we not?” 

Her breath catches, the sentiment enough to make her shiver and begin to weep anew. Like a chronic pain that one learns to cope with, she had pushed aside thoughts of her loneliness, locked them into the corners of her mind like the darkest of secrets. It is not until her Petyr – of course it would be her Petyr, her sweet, dear Petyr – offers her the soothing balm of companionship that she realizes how keenly she has felt her isolation. Overcome, she raises their clasped hands, pressing them to her tear-stained cheek, heedless of the dampness there that leaves her face red and splotchy, her nose running. _He understands, he has always been able to understand._

“Yes,” she breathes, and she tilts her face, allowing herself the luxury of brushing her lips across his knuckles. “We have each other at last.” 

The smile that spreads across his face is slow and satisfied, and there is a gleam in his eyes that she cannot quite identify. The mystery worries her, but she reassures herself that she has plenty of time to discover him anew, to know him as intimately and completely as she had in their days in Riverrun. 

“Then we shall help one another,” he declares, and tremulously, Lysa smiles. 

\--

Catelyn does not even write upon the birth of her fourth child – another son, a second son – and Lysa hears the news from her lord husband. 

She is unable to keep the bitter expression from her face, her lips pursing in displeasure, which Jon misinterprets as unhappiness at not hearing the news from her own sister. “Ned writes that the birth was difficult,” Jon says, and quickly adds, “but your sister is recovering. She is weary, but the danger has passed. I am sure she will write to you when she is feeling better.” 

He need not have coddled her; Lysa has no fear for her sister’s life. Catelyn has ever been the lucky one, the blessed Tully girl, and Lysa is certain that Cat will die an old woman in her bed, surrounded by her dozens of children and hundreds of grandchildren. Why would the gods who have so smiled upon her sister for her entire life curse her now? 

The king does not inquire after Lady Stark when he hears the news of the birth. Instead, he takes the opportunity to lean over to his Hand, the wine sloshing from his cup, and guffaw loudly enough for the entire high table to hear that Jon had obviously chosen the wrong Tully bride all those years ago. “Ned has ice in his cock, yet the Stark brood continues to grow,” he chuckles, taking a swig of his drink, and he does not even glance at Lysa as she flushes red in embarrassment and fists her hands in the folds of her gown. “To little Brandon Stark,” he calls a toast, and his court echoes the sentiment respectfully. At his seat below the dais, Lysa can see Petyr’s jaw working despite the distance between them, and she wonders if he is plagued by thoughts of the last Brandon Stark. 

Jon does not answer the king’s jape, and his refusal to defend her only serves to shame Lysa further. With the clarity of an oft-recalled memory, she thinks of the night that Petyr had challenged Brandon to a duel, how his eyes had flashed in righteous indignation and his voice had echoed off the walls of the hall. Cat is the sort of woman that men raise their swords for, whilst for Lysa, they will not even deign to raise their voices. _His seed is not all that is weak,_ she thinks spitefully, as she glowers at her husband while he looks straight ahead. How he is revered, this Hand of the King who navigated his foster sons through a rebellion –yet the realm is near bankrupt, and their blessed king is nothing more than a lecherous drunk. 

There has never been affection between them, but it is that moment that Lysa realizes that she hates her husband. 

Of course he chooses that night to resume his visits to her bedchamber, for the first time since the loss of her last child. He watches her from the doorway with weary eyes, and she sits still as a statue on the bed, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. 

“I need an heir,” he murmurs softly, scrubbing a hand over his lined face. “Gods help me, my lady, but I need an heir.” 

“I have found the gods to be no friends of mine,” she tells him, her voice is steel and ice. Her old septa would have beaten her backside raw to hear such sacrilege, but Lysa cannot look upon this man that she is doomed to spend her life with and not feel accursed. She longs to order him from her chambers, and the words rush to her lips, but even in her ire, Lysa knows that this is not the way of the world. She wonders what the queen would do – the king and queen are so often in discord that it is near impossible to imagine them sharing a bed long enough to make a child, yet the birth of the third royal babe is imminent, judging by the swell of Queen Cersei’s belly. 

“Neither of us seems particularly blessed,” he replies wearily, and the disappointment in his eyes when he looks upon her turns Lysa’s stomach. Perhaps he is regretting the deal he struck with her father to secure the swords of House Tully, as though wedding a young, beautiful girl of six-and-ten was such a terrible fate. By the expression on his face, Lysa suspects that Jon feels an odd sort of kinship in their mutual disappointment, but it only leaves her angrier still. _None of this is my fault. How dare he look at me as though I have let him down? If I were wed to another, I would have half a dozen babes by now._

She does her duty, as a proper Tully should, lying still and silent on the bed while her husband labors above her. There is no rush of anticipation when he spends his seed, and she does not offer a silent prayer to the Mother as she had every time before. _The gods do not hear my prayers,_ she laments, and she curls up in a ball on her side so that her back is to Jon. 

For a long moment, Lysa can feel his eyes on her back, until he sighs and rises from the bed. He dresses slowly – as the years pass, it seems that he does most everything slowly – and leaves for his own chambers, the door shutting with a final click behind him. Being left alone is as close to a blessing as Lysa has come to expect, and greedily, she holds it close, little as it may be. 

\--

In the end, she is the one to go to Petyr. She has always been the one to go to him. 

He does not look surprised to find her at his door, and he greets her with a deferential _my lady_ before bowing his head to her. At her side, Lysa’s fingers twitch with the desire to reach out and touch the vulnerable nape of his neck, to trace along his hairline and press kisses to the beard that she is learning to tolerate. After all, beneath it he is still her Petyr, and he is not the only one changed in the time they have been apart. 

Petyr stands aside to let her enter, and she hesitates for the briefest of moments, standing on the threshold of all that she wants, if she can only be brave enough to snatch it for herself. It is undoubtedly more dangerous than their romance at Riverrun. She had been a young, foolish maid then, however certain she had been of her heart. Here in the capital, the walls themselves have ears, and it would be all too simple for a whisper of her conduct to make its way to her lord husband. She has lived a thousand days and more of compliant unhappiness, but there is danger in seeking joy, and Lysa has never been as brave as her sister. 

When he touches her cheek with the back of his hand, she is lost. 

“I have waited for you to come to me, sweetling,” he murmurs, and she leans into the brush of his fingers, her eyes fluttering closed. She does not ask why he has kept his distance, nor inquire if he had tried to send her a message – in the end, it does not truly matter. He is here, as she had wished for so long. 

He helps her remove her gown and shift, and Lysa instinctively ducks her head, wrapping her arms shyly around the soft flesh of her middle. She had been a young, pristine maid of six-and-ten when he saw her last, at the height of her beauty, and Lysa is not quite so delusional as to think that she is still that lovely. 

Petyr smiles at her reassuringly, pulling her wrists so that her arms fall to her sides and he can examine her with a critical eye. It leaves her equal parts embarrassed and aroused, as his eyes scrutinize her heavy breasts, marked with pink and white lines, before following the meridian of her body, along her rounded belly and her thickened hips. “Please…don’t,” she whispers, instinctively covering her sex, as though he has not seen every inch of her body before, naked and languid in his bed while the sun rose over the Trident just outside the window. 

Obediently, he turns his attention to removing his own clothing, though his fingers move with a degree of reluctance. When his doublet and shirt are shed, she immediately guesses the reason for his hesitance, and truthfully, she cannot help but be startled by the long, red scar running the length of his chest. When she last beheld him, the wound was fresh and new, but that had been years ago; she never thought it would leave such a lasting mark. She never thought it would remain forever. 

He catches her wrist in an iron grip when she reaches with trembling fingers to touch it, and his eyes go cold and hard in a way that makes her shiver. “No,” he says, his voice full of iron and ire. “Leave it.” 

“Oh, Petyr,” she breathes, tears of sympathy filling her eyes. “I…” 

“No,” he growls. “We will never speak of it.” And then suddenly, as a player putting on his mask for a tableau, he has his smile again, and his hands are gentle as he pulls her toward the bed. “Come, my love. Do we want to waste what precious time we have on the sorrows of our past?” 

She had so long feared that she would never again feel a young man’s touch, the solid smoothness of his hands and chest, that every brush of his fingers along the knobs of her spine, the fall of her hair, is a delight. He urges her onto her hands and knees, and momentarily she flushes, embarrassed at the idea of being taken as though she were no more than a bitch in heat or a whore in a brothel. But when he pushes inside her, the protests fly away from her lips in the sheer delight of having him home again, back where he belongs. In that moment, the world that has treated her so wretchedly fades away, and she is young and happy and free again, in the arms of a man she loves, who loves her in return. 

She cannot help but cry out from joy, a sound that is muffled as Petyr clamps his hand over her mouth. “Shhh, sweetling,” he croons, his voice breathless as he rocks his hips into hers. “You must be silent. We can never be discovered, never. Your husband would have both of our heads.” 

Lysa tries to imagine Jon lifting a great sword to strike their heads from their necks, and she nearly giggles at the absurdity of the image. Perhaps on the day they wed, he would have had sufficient strength – he had been the architect of a successful rebellion, after all. But ruling the realm while their anointed king whores and drinks has taken its toll on Jon, and he seems even more impossibly old now than he did when she was six-and-ten. In eight years, he has aged twenty. 

Petyr’s fingers pinch over her mouth, and she murmurs in protest at the back of her throat. “Don’t be _stupid_ ,” he hisses, his voice dripping in exasperated contempt, and the giggles die on Lysa’s lips. His rebuke hurts, though she knows the truth of his words, the danger into which they dive. It is no laughing matter; it could truly be the death of them both. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, rocking her hips back against his to urge him to move again. “It is only that I have so little to laugh about anymore.” 

He softens, his hand coming to stroke her long hair. “My sweet, stupid girl,” he whispers in honeyed tones, and Lysa does not know if she should be charmed or offended. But soon he is moving again, thrusting hard and deep, and she cannot feel anything but the spasms of pleasure that wrack through her body. 

When they finish and lie sated and coated in a fine sheen of sweat, he mentions her husband again. She hates the mere sound of his name; it taints the sweet perfection of the moment, of lying entwined with the man she loves, his seed drying on her thighs as his hand works furrows through her hair. “I should like an audience with your husband,” he says lightly, shifting onto his side to face her. “He is a very difficult man to catch alone.” 

Instinctively, her lips twist in distaste, and she can hear her own resentment as she mutters, “He is very busy as the King’s Hand.” 

“Ah, yes, and I only seek to ease that burden.” Playfully, his fingers trace along the curve of her cheek before tweaking her nose as though she were a child. “And yours, my lady.” 

“Mine?” she repeats, and she cannot help but smile back, flush and pleased vat his attentions. 

“Of course,” he says. “As we promised, we will help each other. Who else in the world is there for me but you, my sweet?” 

Carefully, Lysa steers her mind away from the lingering memory of her sister, young and fair in Riverrun. She would dip her feet into the cool river waters, tipping her face up to the sun, and Petyr would watch her like a man transfixed, like a man in love, as though Catelyn were the Maiden herself. It is far better to not remember those days at all, lest she conjure her sister’s memory like some ill-begotten ghost. It is better forgotten, and Lysa is all too happy to leave those unpleasant thoughts behind – to remember the sunshine of her childhood and not the showers. 

“No one,” she replies with satisfaction. “There is no one for us but each other.”


	3. Part 3: Sweetrobin

When she next misses her course, she is sure that this child is Petyr’s, that this babe was sent to replace the one that was taken from them. 

For that reason, she calls Petyr to her rooms first and gives him the news even before she tells Jon. It is a foolish, rash move, but Lysa has been a fool for love more than once, and she cannot resist holding his hand over her belly while telling him that she is with child, her face alight with happiness. 

He looks at her, his eyes quite blank. “Why are you telling me?” he asks her coolly, and like a flower, her joy wilts a bit in the face of his frost. 

Yet as the third moon, the fourth, the fifth passes, and her belly swells broadly, even his icy dismissal cannot smother her happiness. “I am fatter with this one than the ones before,” she boasts to her ladies, and she has never been gladder to let out the laces of her gown. From the beginning, she is sure that this babe will be different, that he will _live_ , that he is a sign of her fortune finally changing. Her love has returned to her at long last and brought with him her heart’s desire – a healthy babe to call her own. 

Even Jon finds his smile again, and while the hope in his eyes is muted and faint after so many years of crushing disappointment, it is still _there_. It makes her angry and accommodating all at once; she is so certain that this child is not his, yet she cannot begrudge him when he lays a hand upon the stretched skin of her belly. He too has known the loss of their babes that came before, though Lysa doubts he whispers their names whilst kneeling before the Mother, as she so often does. Her greatest relief is that he does not visit her rooms whilst she carries her babe. Like a set of performers, they hold their breath and wait for the final act with pounding trepidation. 

Her boy is born alive, and while she had clung to that hope with all that remained to her, it is still a surprise to hear his tiny squeak of indignation when he is pulled from her body. 

“He is not strong,” the midwife warns her, as she hands over the bundle. Lysa reaches greedily, eagerly; she has waited her entire life for this moment, to hold her own living son in her arms. It has been a keen aching in her heart since the day Cat birthed her first boy – before that, even - since the day she bled away her child made from love. For the first time since that day, the pain is soothed, like a balm has been spread across the wound. For the first time, Lysa is at peace. 

Her baby is more grey than pink and seems impossibly small and light in the crook of her arm, more like the wisps of the dream child she had imagined than a babe of flesh and blood. But he is alive, and he is _hers_. There is a fine dusting of brown hair on the top of his head, and when his eyes finally open to look upon her, they are the same dark shade. There is more Arryn than Baelish in his features, but to Lysa’s surprise, she finds that it does not truly matter to her. Above all, he is _hers_ , and no one in the world will be able to take that away from her. 

“We will name him Robert,” Jon declares when he comes to her rooms after she is cleaned and the babe is swaddled. He cradles the bundle in the crook of his elbow, beaming at the sight of that elusive prize, the long-awaited heir. “After our king.” 

Lysa bristles at the thought of naming her sweet boy for the drunken oaf who sits the Iron Throne, the king that Jon still loves. “As you wish,” she replies through gritted teeth. 

But by the time the sun has dipped beneath the horizon and her room has grown dark, she has decided to call him her Sweetrobin. The name suits, for he is as fragile as a baby bird, and Lysa already knows that nothing and no one will ever be dearer to her. _Unless there are more,_ she allows herself to think, and the seed of hope blooms anew. _Perhaps it is a bit of ill luck that has worked itself out, perhaps I will have a dozen strong sons to fill my life with laughter and love._

Her Sweetrobin is a fussy babe, and for the first weeks of his life, he struggles to suckle. Jon finds a wet nurse, a big-breasted common woman, but Lysa refuses her assistance and sends her away. She is certain that there could be no better nurse for her son than herself, and she has resolved to share him with no one. Instead, she sits for hours in the privacy and quiet of her chambers with her son cuddled to her chest, waiting for him to root and find her nipple. “Come, my sweetling,” she coos, gently guiding him, tilting his head to her breast even as he cries and turns his face away. “Mother’s milk will help you grow into a big, strong boy.” That she passes nearly the entirety of her days in this fashion does not trouble her in the slightest. For her boy, she would do anything, and she is determined that he shall want for nothing – most especially, he will never want for her love and attention. 

After a few weeks, he finally is able to regularly feed, and the progress is nearly as exhilarating as birthing him had been. To Lysa’s delight, his newfound ability means that there is now time enough in the day to unswaddle him, to examine his tiny, perfect fingers and toes, to plant kisses on his little belly. “He is stronger every day,” she declares happily to Maester Pycelle when he examines the babe, and blithely, she ignores the doubtful gaze he turns upon her. She is certain that she is right - that with more tender care, soon Sweetrobin will be as big and bonny as any of Catelyn’s children. 

She is so absorbed in the care of her son that she does not even notice when two moons pass without Petyr calling upon her. For the first time since she was a girl, she does not truly miss him; for the first time, there is something bigger than her love for him. Her love for her son does not _replace_ the love she has for Petyr, but adds to it, making Lysa feel fuller and lighter all at once. She loves the two of them so much that there is simply no room for anyone else. _Sweetrobin must be his son,_ she takes to telling herself. She may have thought her boy’s features to resemble the Arryns, but her own mother was brown-haired as well. _I judged too quickly. I was weary from the birth. Surely, something as precious as my boy could not have come from Jon’s seed._

When the third moon turns and her little Sweetrobin can lift his head to gaze at her with his serious brown eyes, Petyr finally comes to see her, his face perturbed. “My lady,” he greets coolly, and his lips barely graze her knuckles when he bends his head to kiss her hand. _Is he jealous?_ Lysa wonders, and the thought is as comical as it is exciting. She is flush with the joy of seeing him again, and wonders how to best let him know that there is no need for envy – that there is room enough in her heart for both of the boys who mean so much to her: the son she has waited for and the man she is sure brought him to her. 

He gives Sweetrobin only the most cursory of glances, and there is no pride or awe in his voice when he comments, “A fine boy. My congratulations, my lady.” 

“He is a fine boy,” Lysa agrees, beaming. His seeming disinterest does not bother her – hadn’t Petyr told her that they must be careful, that they must avoid rousing her husband’s suspicion? Why would a member of the palace office of the treasury show any sort of keen interest in the son of the Hand? _Petyr would love him, if he were allowed,_ she tells herself – it is impossible to think otherwise, to think that anyone would _not_ love her sweet babe. If Jon would do her the courtesy of dying, they would be able to live openly as a family instead. 

The words sound callous even in her own mind, but Lysa quickly forgives herself – it is always so easy to pardon herself for her emotional weakness, knowing that the rest of the world will not, no matter how much she deserves understanding. She does not quite _wish_ him dead, but on the day that they wed, she never expected him to live as long as he already has. He is so terribly old, and she has lost so much of her life to this unhappy union. And now that he has his heir – now that she finally has her son – certainly he must die soon so that her life can finally begin? _I shall choose my next match,_ she decides as she rocks Sweetrobin in the safety of her arms, eyeing Petyr as he moves to the fireplace. _Not Father nor any Vale lord who thinks to order me. My destiny will finally be my own._

“I hear that the king has left the appointment of Master of Coin to your husband,” Petyr says, his back to Lysa, and she starts in surprise before forcing herself to focus on his sudden subject change. “I do hope that the Hand’s memory is as long as his patience, and he recalls my years of leal service to House Arryn.” 

A frown tugs at the corners of her lips, a twinge of displeasure twisting in her stomach. She hates the thought of Petyr in service to House Arryn. She has always been the one to work in his best interests, to use her position and influence to help him gain what he deserves. She has been the steadfast one, faithful in her belief in his talents, and it is because of her that he is now at court. Hadn’t he always said so? That she is his truest friend, his most stalwart supporter? And so she hates the idea that he considers himself in service to House Arryn, in debt to her lord husband when Lysa has pulled the strings – it is Lysa to whom he owes his allegiance, it is Lysa he should thank. 

“Perhaps you should speak to the Hand, then,” she snips, snatching up Sweetrobin’s chubby little fist, and laying a kiss upon his knuckles, acting as though she is far too busy to attend to Petyr and his never-ending ambition. 

At once, his demeanor softens; he turns and smiles at her ruefully. “Ah, Lysa, do not be this way. Not you. You know how I need you.” He crosses to her and lays his hand upon hers, where it protectively cups her son’s head. She looks at their entwining fingers over the soft downy brown of Sweetrobin’s hair with longing. It is the very tableau of her greatest desire, a dream playing out right before her eyes yet still forever out of her reach. “Truly, I do it for you, my love,” he whispers, and she raises her blue eyes, surprised. 

“For me?” she repeats skeptically, and Petyr nods seriously. 

“Of course,” he replies, so earnestly that she can do nothing but believe him wholeheartedly. His hand slips from Sweetrobin’s head to her cheek, toying with a loose tendril of auburn hair that she had tucked behind her ear. “I want to be worthy of you, sweetling. The Lady of the Eyrie could never wed little Lord Baelish of the Fingers. I need a title and wealth. A seat on the council would bring them to me, and thus, bring me to you.” 

Lysa’s breath catches in her throat, and she feels her cheeks flush. She manages to catch a glimpse of herself in the looking glass behind Petyr’s head, and she cannot help but think she looks enchanting, with the babe in her arms, her hair falling loose, and the bloom of pink in her face. “I would wed you if you were the lowest merchant,” she whispers. She means the words she says, but she cannot deny even to herself that she is used to a certain station in life, and that she would much prefer to marry her love as Master of Coin than as a peasant. 

“I do not doubt you,” Petyr assures her, “but I know you would never compromise your son’s inheritance that way. It shall be a long time before he is a man, and the lords of the Vale will demand a lord of proper station stand by your side as you rule the Eyrie until his majority.” 

_As I rule…_ she repeats the words to herself – foolishly, she had prayed for her husband’s death and her own freedom but had never stopped to consider where that would leave her, now that she finally had a son. _I would rule the Eyrie, as good as a lord in my own right._

“Of course…” she whispers, still dazed by the weight of the realization. And then, just as quickly, she is overcome by a rush of admiration for the man before her. “Oh, Petyr, you do think of everything. You are so clever,” she declares, reaching for him. 

Tenderly, he takes her within the circle of his arms. “That is why we need each other, my love,” he replies warmly. He presses a chaste kiss to her forehead, and desperate for more after such an extended absence, Lysa tilts her face up to him. To her disappointment, he does not bend to claim her mouth – he only smiles that clever grin of his, that wicked curl of his lips that in his youth, always gave away that he was up to some sort of mischief. “Together, we may achieve anything that we want. Anything at all.” 

\--

Lysa tells herself that suggesting that Jon send Petyr to the Vale, to report upon the bookkeeping in their long absence, has everything to do with proving Petyr’s prowess and nothing to do with the fact that Catelyn will be coming to court. 

It would be foolish for her to be jealous. Since his arrival in the capital, Petyr never inquires after Catelyn as he once had in his letters to Lysa. Surely, his boyhood affections are long dead by now, since he has made his dedication to Lysa perfectly clear. Cat is long forgotten, a remnant of youth now lost to the North – yet, she cannot help but be cautious. _It is for both of us,_ she thinks as she bids Petyr farewell. His lips are like ice when they brush her knuckles, his eyes hard as granite, and for a brief moment, panic flutters in her stomach – had he learned of the impending visit, and does he suspect her reasons for asking him to do this errand? 

_No_ , she reassures herself. Where would he learn such a thing, in this court where she is his only friend? 

To Jon’s delight, Catelyn’s sour-faced husband accompanies her, and to Lysa’s relief, Catelyn brings only her youngest boy, and not her entire brood of children. “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell,” she says with a wry chuckle and a shrug of her shoulders that suggests these northerners are still an odd sort to her, even after all of these years. 

It is almost like she imagined in her youth, sitting with Catelyn in her chambers with both of their boys. Catelyn’s son has just passed his second name day and is endlessly curious about the world around him, scrambling down from Catelyn’s lap and scaling Lysa’s chest of drawers, as quick as a flash. In comparison, Sweetrobin seems even smaller than he is, and he shows no interest in walking or even crawling, despite being a year of age. It is not such a problem in Lysa’s opinion – her sweet little one will do all in his own time, and she is happy to tend to his every need in the meanwhile. But Jon frowns in displeasure, his eyes heavy with worry as they wander from their son to Catelyn’s boisterous boy, and Lysa can see the doubt in his eyes that Sweetrobin will be as hardy as little Brandon in just another year’s time. _He has no faith, only I believe in our boy,_ she thinks bitterly, and slowly, she feels her few lingering warm feelings towards Jon since Sweetrobin’s birth fade away. It is disappointing and liberating at the same time. 

Luckily, she finds herself free from Jon’s sad stare most afternoons. The king demands the attention of both the Hand and Lord Stark, as though gathering them close will allow him to relive his glory days as a young, handsome warrior rather than a sad, fat drunk. And so she is left alone with her sister and their children, the way she had pictured as a new bride in Riverrun, in what seemed a thousand years ago. 

Catelyn’s company does not bring her the joy it once did – instead, Lysa finds her tongue stilled by the secrets that sit between them, and in the stretches of silence, she studies Cat’s profile, cataloguing all the ways that time has been sweeter to her sister. Should she have doubted it, when the gods have always smiled down upon her? Of course she is still slender, still smooth-skinned, her eyes bright and her color high. They walk into the hall each night side-by-side, and Lysa wonders if those who turn to look at them wonder which sister is the elder, and which the younger. At times, Lysa herself forgets; she has seen a thousand years’ worth of sorrows. 

But she tells herself firmly that the time for despair is finally behind her, and to remind herself of that fact, she tells her sister a secret that she has thus far hoarded for herself. “I have glad news,” she says, after dismissing her ladies so that she is alone with Catelyn and their children for company. “I am with child again.” 

Catelyn’s face brightens, and a smile blossoms upon her lips. “I am so glad for you,” she says, reaching over to clasp Lysa’s hand, and Lysa feels a vindictive thrill when Cat does not announce her own pregnancy. “Robert will bloom with a sibling, you’ll see. He will grow into a strong boy yet.” 

“No one said that he would not,” Lysa replies sharply, withdrawing her hand with a sinking heart. Naturally, her sister would remind her of her failures and her losses, would point out that her babe is tiny and his health fragile. _He will grow into a lord far greater than Catelyn’s son,_ she thinks bitterly. 

“Of course not,” Catelyn answers gently, and Lysa hates her tone, as though Cat is trying to placate her. Lysa has the most handsome son in the world and another babe growing strong within her; she has no need for Cat’s pity. Rather, _she_ should be sorry for _Catelyn_. She has heard such dreadful stories of the frigid, remote north, and Cat’s husband is as grim-faced and icy as everyone says, as cold as Brandon had been wild and vivacious. Catelyn may seem happy, but she has always been the most dutiful and responsible of all the Tullys; she would convince herself into joy, if need be. 

Gently, Cat squeezes Lysa’s hand, and reluctantly, Lysa meets her eye. “All I have ever wanted for you is your happiness,” Catelyn says softly, and Lysa knows that is not quite true. If all those years ago, Lysa had admitted that her only happiness would be in becoming Lady Baelish, her sister would have never helped her. No, Cat may wish her to be happy, but she wishes Lysa to find that happiness in the lot that life has dealt her, as Catelyn herself has done. Only Lysa is brave and bold enough to seize her own destiny, to make her own happy ending. Only Lysa is strong enough to fly in the face of duty and honor, to defy her father’s wishes and make her own path. Only Lysa is special, while Catelyn, much like her brand of happiness, is ordinary and dull. _Perhaps I should have kept Petyr here after all, so he could see for himself how unremarkable she has become._

But despite the vast difference between what Catelyn had wished for her and what Lysa hopes lies ahead, affection still bubbles forth in her chest upon hearing her sister’s good wishes. “I will be,” she assures Cat, squeezing her hand in return. “Finally, I will be.” 

\--

The babe is a girl, and she never takes a breath. 

“She will grow stronger,” Lysa protests hoarsely, her lips dry and cracking, her hair damp with sweat. They had told her Sweetrobin would not live either, and he is her most precious gift. Greedily, she reaches her hands for the babe, and Maester Pycelle reluctantly hands the still little bundle over to her. The babe is silent and blue, still bloody from the birth, but Lysa cuddles her to her chest, as though her heart may teach her daughter’s how to beat. 

Her little girl has a dusting of auburn hair upon the crown of her head. Lysa has dreamed for so long of having a daughter. 

She had been so sure, after Sweetrobin…so confident that whatever ill luck plagued her had worked itself out…

“You killed her,” she whispers, and she does not know of whom she speaks. The maester? Jon, far away from the blood and pain of the birthing chamber? Or does she damn herself as the empty vessel she is? All she is certain of is that someone, _someone_ must be to blame. When she pushes the bundle away from her chest, and Pycelle bends to reclaim her, she makes her decision. “You _killed_ her!” she cries out this time, and her cheeks are hot and damp with the fat tears that roll from her eyes. “You _stupid_ , careless fool, you killed my child! I will see you _hanged_ for this!” 

She lunges towards the maester, but old and frail as he may be, she is exhausted from the birthing bed, and her fingers close helplessly around empty air. She had forgotten the terrible weariness of birthing a child for nothing; it has been so long since that terrible birth in the Eyrie, and once she had passed her fourth moon, she had thought herself safe. She had forgotten the horror of feeling a babe grow and kick within her, of having her belly swell broadly, of going through the pain and terror of a full labor only to feel the child slip from her body and never utter a cry. 

An almost inhumane wail tears from her throat, and she is laughing and sobbing at the same time, clawing at the fine silken sheets beneath her, now stained with sweat and blood and loss. “Take it away! I do not want to see it anymore!” she sobs, turning her face into the pillow – she must think of the child as an ‘it’ now, not a ‘she,’ not a girl that could have been named Minisa for her mother, not the daughter she had dreamed of sitting while Lysa ran a brush through her hair. It is nothing but a bag of bones, nothing but a growth within her, always _nothing, nothing, nothing._

The soft down of the pillow pushes against her mouth and nose. In her grief, Lysa thinks that were it not for Sweetrobin, she would bury her face harder and deeper until she, too, never awoke. None of her ladies step forward to comfort her; instead, they melt back as though they are part of the tapestry, as though she is quite alone – alone, as she always ends up in the end. 

“Bring my son to me,” she manages to gasp through her sobs. Like a drowning woman, she desperately seeks something with which to tether herself, and in the end, there has always been only one thing that truly mattered to her in all the world. “Bring him here.” 

Maester Pycelle frowns at her. His hands are bloody but empty, and that is a relief; Lysa can almost pretend that she has imagined the whole thing, that she never gave birth at all. _All will be well once Sweetrobin is here in my arms,_ she thinks feverishly. “My lady, I do not think that most wise…” the maester blusters, and Lysa seethes. 

“I do not care what you _think_!” she screeches, and in futile rage, she hurtles one of those plump pillows at his head. He bats it away, harmless thing that it is, and his frown deepens into a scowl. “I care not at all for your words! Bring my son to me this instant, or the Hand of the King will hear of this!” 

“Perhaps that would be for the best,” Pycelle mutters darkly, and Lysa realizes suddenly that he thinks her mad, and that all the ladies who shrink back against the walls likely think it, too. _Perhaps I_ am _mad,_ she ponders, as she falls wearily back onto the bed. _Do the mad know that they are mad?_

Mad or not, she does get her way, and the midwife returns with Sweetrobin toddling beside her, clutching her fingers with his little fist. He is two now, and still unsteady on his feet as a newborn fawn. How she hates to see her precious son lean on any other woman, how she hates the wariness that enters his darling brown eyes when he sees her lying weary in the bed, how she hates the way that he shrinks back from her. 

“It is all right, my baby,” she coos, and she is surprised at how easily she finds her sweet voice again. “Come. Sit with Mother. She has missed you.” 

Sweetrobin looks dolefully at the midwife, and she lifts him and places him on the bed, on the mattress beside Lysa’s head. When he cuddles against the pillow, she is glad that she hurtled only one at Maester Pycelle in her rage. “Come here,” she whispers, opening her arms to her babe, and he curls upon her breast, like a little docile lamb. 

It is a relief when he instinctively begins rooting against her chest; Lysa’s breasts ache, full of milk for the babe that will never be. Eagerly, she unlaces the top of her gown so that her precious son may suckle. _It will help him grow strong,_ she tells herself as she strokes the fine baby hairs at his temple. _Into a big, sturdy boy, and that will be enough for me._

She is determined that he will be enough for her; she will dedicate every moment to his benefit, and it will be enough for her. 

\--

The fits start just after Sweetrobin’s fourth nameday. 

She is supping with Jon in their accustomed strained silence – the distance, the cool estrangement between them has only become more pronounced since their daughter’s stillbirth. Without saying a word, they each judge the other guilty. More and more, Lysa is sure that Sweetrobin must have been born of that one blissful night in Petyr’s arms. How she has dreamed of that night, though Petyr comes to her so seldom anymore, now that he has his seat on the council. “We must be seen as the picture of propriety,” he had told her, and bowed to her and kissed her hand with as much skill as any man born and bred for greatness. _I told Father he would rise high,_ she remembers with pride, yet she cannot help but mourn the distance forced between them – like the peaks of two mountains, destined never to meet. 

One of her ladies from the Vale bursts in, unannounced, and Lysa looks up sharply, a rebuke on her lips. She may despise her marriage, but she will not compromise on the prestige it allows her – she is still the third lady of the court, behind only the queen and little princess. The court may think her mad, but they will still treat her in accordance with her station. But the words that tumble from her maid’s lips stop Lysa cold and turns the blood in her veins to ice. “My lord, my lady, come quickly! It is the little lord!” 

She races down the corridors, skirts gathered in her sweaty palms, sparing neither moment nor glance for the members of the court left in her wake. When she arrives in her son’s nursery, she barely registers the way that he shakes on the floor, his eyes rolled back into his head, before she is falling beside him to take him in her arms. She claws at the nursemaids and the maester who try to attend to him, and clamps him securely to her bosom, just as she did the day he was born. _I promised that day to keep you safe,_ she thinks desperately, and she tries to hold him still as his thin little arms and legs flail wildly in all directions, as though she could hold him together that way, as though she could _save_ him if only she squeezed him tightly enough. _Do not take him, do not take him, not my boy, not my only boy,_ she silently begs of the gods, as she feels her chest heave against his trembling body as she suppresses her anguished sobs. 

Lysa shushes him as he screams, rocking him back and forth as she delighted in doing when he was small enough to fit in the crook of her arm. Later, Pycelle gives her milk of the poppy and tells her that she had been the one crying out, that Sweetrobin had not uttered a sound. Surely, she tells herself later as she rests in bed, that is impossible. 

\--

Pycelle tries to placate Lysa and her husband, telling them that Sweetrobin may grow out of his fits, yet Lysa can tell by the shift of the maester’s beady eyes that he lies. Jon suggests that sending Sweetrobin to the Eyrie may improve his health, that the high, thin air is better for little lungs than the filth and humidity of King’s Landing in the summer. “And it is just as well that he should learn the lands that will be his one day,” Jon muses, but all Lysa hears is that he wants to send her Sweetrobin away, out of both sight and reach. _He is mad to even suggest it,_ Lysa thinks in horror – who would take better charge of her baby’s health than she? Who else would give him the tender care that he so obviously needs? 

_He does not care about my Sweetrobin,_ she decides, and furiously, she blinks away the tears that well in her eyes at the thought that _anyone_ could not be enamored of her dear little one. She is used to being the least loved, but Sweetrobin is Jon’s first born son, his one true heir – the sun should rise and set on her boy, as it always has for Catelyn and for Edmure, too. 

_Catelyn – it is her fault,_ Lysa realizes, _for coming to court with her son._ Jon had looked at that sturdy red-haired babe so wistfully. Had that been the moment when he had looked at their boy – their sweet, precious, perfect child – and found him lacking? Did Jon wish to hide him in the Eyrie, so that they may pretend he never existed at all? Did he pray for a fat Tully-haired child to take his place, or did he hope for a different young maid to whelp for him? Did he wish her gone as certainly as he wished their son gone? The idea is outrageous – Lysa had been young and beautiful the day that they wed; Jon should thank the gods on his knees every day that her father had been desperate enough to give her to him. 

“No,” she gasps before she swallows her fury and finds her voice. “ _No!_ ” 

Jon scrubs a hand wearily over his face, but he does not look surprised. The thought that he anticipated her refusal and still sought to move forward anyway, is like kindling on the flames of her outrage. “Court is no place for a child,” he says bluntly, and Lysa bristles. 

“Shall the queen be banishing her children as well, then?” she demands sarcastically. “Shall they too be exiled to live without a mother’s love, without – “ 

Jon’s hand connects on the closed door with a sharp slap that surprises her so much, she instinctively falls silent. They may have never found peace in their relationship, but Jon is not one for outbursts, choosing to ignore and avoid her, rather than try to please her. “Gods damn you, can you be reasonable for _one_ moment of your life?” he explodes, and then he repeats his curse. “Gods damn you!” 

“They did the day they gave me to you in marriage!” she shrieks in response, her voice too high and shrill even to her own ears. Her hands curl into fists of impotent rage while his lip curls in displeasure, and then there is silence once more. That same terrible, loaded quiet that has followed them from Riverrun to the Eyrie to King’s Landing, that always signified that they were worlds apart and content to remain that way. 

“I do not have time for your tantrums,” he tells her, and his voice is controlled again, laced with the scolding that should be reserved for a naughty child. That is all she has ever been to him – a spoiled, resentful child - just as he is nothing more than a disgusting, heartless old man to her. Of course they have spent the entirety of their marriage hurtling toward disaster – how should two such people ever come to an accord? “The small council meets within the hour.” 

She does not answer; she offers him not a word as he clips the chain of office onto his doublet and reaches for the handle of the door. Only when he is nearly gone does she speaks again. “Jon,” she calls, her voice loud and unnatural sounding. Her husband glances back at her, his eyes flashing with impatience, but he waits – ever the cordial lord, he waits. 

“If you take my son away from me,” she whispers, the gravity of the words making her nearly inaudible, “I will see you dead.” 

\--

It should be easy, but in the end, it is not. 

She had meant the words she said to Jon, yet they had not seemed to deter him. He merely changes his plans for their son, without her knowledge and certainly without her consent. Petyr brings her the news that her husband has approached Lord Stannis to request he foster Sweetrobin, far away in damp Dragonstone. Petyr clasps her hands between his with a look of sorrow upon his face, and still, she hesitates. 

She does not merely hesitate – she cries and rages, while Petyr wraps her in his arms, the only place in the world she has ever felt safe. “I will die,” she whispers, rubbing her raw cheek against his chest. “I will die if Jon takes him away.” The Stormlands are harsh and unforgiving, and she is sure that her delicate little baby will be torn to shreds the moment he steps upon their shores. _Jon wants this, he wants to be rid of us both. He longs to be rid of his only trueborn heir, and he knows if that happened, I would kill myself in despair._ Fear and fury war in her stomach, fighting for dominance, and reluctantly she pushes away from Petyr’s embrace, fearing that she may become ill. 

“No, my love,” Petyr whispers in response, and she clings to the certainty in his voice, allowing his confidence to wrap around her like a blanket. “There is another way.” He kisses her once, and then again, his mouth open and warm against hers, and it is all too easy to sink into that, too. He is, as ever, the only one she truly trusts, the only friend she has in a storm of enemies. Her gown falls as easily as her tears. 

He pushes the vial into her fingers as he pushes his cock inside her, and Lysa cries out – it is like coming home, like shedding her heavy skin and hardened heart and flying free as a bird. “I will help you,” Petyr whispers in her ear, and his fingers close over her palm, pushing the tiny glass bottle further into her grip with each tantalizing rock of his hips. She shudders, arching her body up against him, and her fingers close around the vial. She does not ask what it is – she need not ask. She knows the men of the court call her stupid and mad, but she knows what is being placed into her hands. 

It feels dangerous, it feels reckless, and it feels powerful. 

“I will protect you both,” Petyr promises. “Who else is there in the world for me but you? You and our boy?” And that is where she succumbs, just as she clenches around him – the only answer she has for him has always been _yes, yes, yes._

“No one,” she gasps, as she runs her thumb over the stopper. “And there is no one for me but Sweetrobin and you. And then…we can be together?” She puts a hand to his cheek, her gaze upon his face blurred by the tears in her eyes. They make everything seem foggy and far away, and coupled with the lump in her throat, she feels as though she is drowning. It reminds her of her childhood, when she would sink beneath the waters of the river and look up at the world. _What if I just kept sinking forever?_ she would sometimes think, but in the end her fear had always won out and she would break through the surface with a startled gasp. 

She is not afraid now. 

“Yes,” Petyr assures her. “Then we can be together.” 

Petyr kisses her, and Lysa swears she can taste his smile. 

_Fin._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Again, feedback welcome and appreciated.


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